Marc Hughes, Manager of Software Engineering at Tom Snyder Productions, will show us two open source Flex libraries, Degrafa and ObjectHandles.

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Degrafa is a declarative graphics framework that lets you create graphical assets in MXML. He'll show us how to create some visuals without any bitmap or vector based art assets and then use those to skin Flex components. ObjectHandles is a library he wrote to allow developers to easily create a Flex application that allows movement & resizing of onscreen objects by users. Marc will give a quick introduction to that and show off a few examples of it in use. After the introduction of these two libraries, he will demonstrate how to build a basic diagramming application using Degrafa and ObjectHandles. You can see ObjectHandles in action right below this paragraph:

As described at www.degrafa.com, "The focus behind the Declarative Graphics Framework (Degrafa) is to bring the graphics classes up a level to provide a common ground between developer and designer within Flex, and enable the graphics classes to become first class citizens within the Flex framework." Goals of the project include significantly lowering learning curve to use graphics features of Flex, superior creative flexibility, improving productivity and collaboration between designers and programmers, increasing other aspects of productivity including code reuse, faster development cycles, readability and optimization.

Degrafa is also being officially integrated into Adobe Thermo & FXG.

In addition to his work at Tom Synder, Marc is also a winner of Adobe's AIR Derby with his Agile Agenda application. He is the creator of the ObjectHandles and Pulse Particles Degrafa libraries and you can read his blog at Marc’s Musings.

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The previously scheduled speaker, Eric Hilfer, will be back on a later date to speak about using the Flex Automation Framework.

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